Rachel Flaherty is a journalist at The Irish Times. In 2017, she decided she wanted to take some steps to become fitter and healthier. She felt her relationship with food had become "warped". Rachel joined Brenda Donohue in studio on The Ray D'Arcy Show this afternoon.

In a recent article, Rachel introduced readers to her struggles with how she viewed food. She detailed years of binge eating, classifying foods as 'good' or 'bad' and her decision one year ago to change the way she thought about food.

"I was a bit worried about how it would be received. I did write it as honestly as I could. So, I knew I was putting myself out there."

Over 100 people have sent Rachel their personal stories of their relationship with food as a result of her article.

"I'm really overwhelmed with the reaction it got…I didn't know what to expect."

From her early 20s on, Rachel embarked on a series of extreme diets, where she would cut out whole groups of food. She went through spurts of either exercising intensely or not at all.

"I was a size 12, which I thought was terrible…So, I decided I wanted to go down to a size 10/8."

It got to the point where she began to see flaws in the most benign of foods.

"I read that there was too much sugar in carrots and I remember going, oh God, I have to say goodbye to carrots now. This is terrible."

While she did lose weight adhering to these diets, Rachel remembers feeling "miserable". Food dominated her thoughts.

"I thought about it morning, noon and night. I was so sick of thinking about it. And that kind of warped my thinking then. Before then I'd never thought of food as 'good' and 'bad'."

Rachel says she found herself consuming large amounts of foods she didn't actually enjoy.

"It put them on some kind of pedestal…some of the junk foods that, you know, as the years wore on, that I used to eat a lot of, I didn't even particularly like the taste of them. I just thought, oh I'm going to let it go tonight, eat whatever. Tomorrow I'll eat less, I'll eat much better, I'll do loads of exercise. My habits just got worse and worse and worse."

Rachel told Brenda that she would feel "motivated" in the morning and have a small breakfast, not eating much throughout the day. In the evenings, hungry from a day of restricting her food intake, she would binge on bread and chocolate.

"I would be starving when I got home. Then, I'd probably get something on the way home in a shop…It got to a stage where I would probably skip dinner, I'd just have the junk food."

This time last year was Rachel's tipping point. She was 32kg overweight, going by the BMI index.

"I just felt I was caught in this vicious cycle. You'd kind of start off the morning from the night before and you'd feel a bit sick with a headache when you woke up because you're already after eating a load of sugar and junk the night before…You wake up tired."

She remembers walking up a flight of stairs and finding it difficult to breathe deeply.

"I hadn't really taken to heart about how it was affecting me health wise…I just felt almost squished in my own body. Like, not being able to take a proper deep breath."

Rachel started keeping a food diary. As well as tracking what she was eating, she also noted her mood after eating something. The results spurred her to make a change in her mindset.

"I didn't realise how angry and annoyed I was at myself...I wasn't walking around in misery every day but this aspect of my life really bothered me. And I thought, if it bothers me enough to think about it every day, then you need to do something about it."

An important aspect of changing the way she saw food was not eliminating whole food groups, Rachel explained.

"I didn't want to go down the route of banning anything…I just try to stay away from certain things that I knew that I would eat too much of."

In tandem with some weight training classes and nightly walks, Rachel feels she is being kinder to herself than she was one year ago.

"I think I was far too hard on myself. The way I spoke to myself, I would never speak to anyone else...Be a bit nicer to yourself."

Journalist Rachel Flaherty wrote in the Irish Times health supplement about her ongoing struggle with her weight and how she gained five stone by eating sugar and junk food until her stomach hurt. The piece has got a huge reaction online and Rachel joins Brenda Donohue in studio now.

Posted by RTÉ Radio 1 on Monday, August 20, 2018

Listen back to the whole interview on The Ray D'Arcy Show here.